The Fight Against Worldwide Child Slavery & the Sex Trade ｜ Jim Caviezel and Tim Ballard ｜ EP 372 (rTBGNEliczc)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=rTBGNEliczc

This is the best interview I’ve ever had in my life. I love your line of questioning and getting to what is real. I hooked into Tim as a childlike quality to him, and I stay with that innocence. And don’t take that innocence as weakness. And when I read the scripture, I feel truth, good, evil, and I find the good. And let that just pierce the darkness. Hello everyone watching and listening. Today I have the pleasure of speaking to two people. Someone you most likely know for his portrayal of death. And I’m going to talk about the two people who are the most important people in the world. For his portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth in Passion of the Christ, Jim Caviezel. And also someone you should know if you don’t already. The man behind Operation Underground Railroad, Tim Ballard. We discussed the new film, The Sound of Freedom, wherein Mr. Caviezel plays Tim Ballard in the telling of his real life story, detailing his fight against the increasingly worldwide and pervasive childhood sex trade. The film, The Sound of Freedom, releases on July 4th. So about a week and a half ago, I got a text message from Tony Robbins suggesting that I watch a new film called The Sound of Freedom. And I did that about four days ago with my wife, Tammy, and was quite struck by the movie. And I decided to follow up on it. It details out the efforts of one man, Tim Ballard, to investigate a child’s sexual slave ring and to rescue the children that were associated with that. But it also points to a broader social problem, which is the spread of sexual and slave trafficking worldwide abetted by the net, which is a great avenue for psychopathic criminals to pursue their darkest desires with very little risk of being caught, especially on the multinational basis. So I decided to reach out to Tim Ballard, who is the man who the movie is about, and to Jim Caviezel, who’s the actor that plays him, to talk about what all this signifies. And so, Tim, let’s start with you. I mean, the movie makes the case that there is a widely expanding network of slavery, essentially, making itself manifest worldwide, concentrating in no small part on very young children who are being sold repeatedly to pedophilic psychopaths to have at their will, and of course can be sold repeatedly for that purpose. And the movie makes the case that this is now an operation that’s rivaling the drug trade in magnitude. So it sounds like yet another right-wing conspiracy. So please, why don’t you walk us through what you know and help me understand, and everybody watching and listening, exactly what you think is going on. Yeah, thank you so much, Jordan. We’re so grateful you take your time to do this with us. So I spent 12 years as a special agent undercover operator with the Department of Homeland Security. Most of my time, 90% of that time, is spent investigating these cases, child crimes, child trafficking. And in fact, those numbers are correct. These are Department of Labor, UN, these are sources that, the best we have, that say that there’s close to 6 million children or more who are forced into sex slavery, labor slavery, or organ harvesting. And I can attest that I have been involved in cases involving all three of those forms of slavery multiple times and is absolutely is a real thing. It’s not even far, far from home. It’s, the United States is the number one consumer year after year of child rape material. And oftentimes we were close to number one in production. And it’s a serious matter. You know, the case, the story in Sound of Freedom kicks off with the rescue of a little boy at the port of entry, at the Southern border. That’s a real story, a real boy, that I was on that port of entry. I was 10 years on the Southern border. So when you have 85,000 unaccompanied minors showing up in the last two years, being let into the country without the sponsor being vetted, DNA checked, background checked, you know, I call it the economy of pedophilia. The United States, we’re the demand, 85,000 children, thousands of them are under five years old, are let into the country. So we have a serious, serious problem and it’s not being addressed as it should be. Hopefully this film can do that. What has been your experience with regard to so-called mainstream media or legacy media coverage? How much attention has been paid to this? And if not much, why? And if reasonably, who and how? Well, I think not very much has been, you know, attention has been given by mainstream media. Oftentimes it’s more innocent than cynical perhaps where it’s just, this is too dark. I don’t want to expose our audience to this horrific thing. I film, we film our operations. I mean, I’m going to post today another operation in West Africa of a baby factory. I mean, these are real cases where they’ve kidnapped women, a young as 13 year old children, and they impregnate them, they rape them and they make babies and they take these babies and sell them for their organs, sell them for sex, sell them for satanic ritual abuse. Like it does sound crazy. That’s why I film it. Our operations, we film our operations so that we can show the world. This is very real. It’s really happening. And I think if there’s 2 million children forced into commercial sex, which is the most kind of credible statistic that we can find, a lot of people are involved. So there is a more cynical answer to your question, which may be there’s people that don’t want this exposed because they’re involved in it. So I’m going to harass you a bit here from the Wikipedia page. There is some, not that I’m particular fan of Wikipedia pages depending on the circumstances, but there are some criticisms of what you’re doing. And I thought we might as well address them right off the bat because people who are watching are going to be, look, man, if I was coming across this for the first time and in some ways I am, I’ve got two choices in front of me, don’t I? I can either presume that you’ve discovered something that’s ongoing and of tremendous significance that’s terribly dark, or I can assume that the difficult work that you had done for a decade, genuinely addressing these problems has made you hypersensitive to a threat and willing to magnify it. And it would be easier just to ignore you as a consequence. Now that would be the preferable outcome to such an investigation, wouldn’t it? So you can, as you said, you can understand why people might want to avert their eyes from such a thing. So I’m going to walk through these criticisms and maybe you could, you know, you can respond to them and we can get that out of the way before we go deeper into the film and your operations. So your group, and this is Operation Underground Railroad and tell me if I get anything wrong here, says it devoused conspiracy theories, though founder Tom Bellard was criticized for refusing to condemn the QAnon conspiracy theory. I have no idea what the hell that means. Do you know what that’s referring to? Yeah, absolutely. We, that’s a lie on Wikipedia. We have absolutely in our FAQs for years have condemned the majority of what we see with conspiracy theories. So they like to attribute me to the QAnon movement. There may be some truths in there, but there’s so many falsehoods on top of that. So our FAQs refute that immediately because it discredits the movement. In fact, I would go so far as to consider that maybe certain people who don’t want this known are responsible for some of the conspiracy theories in order to discredit the movement and they go too far. They go too far in their assessment of things. But yeah, we absolutely have disavowed generally coming out of QAnon. Yeah, well, it says, you know, it’s very vague on Wikipedia. It says to condemn the QAnon conspiracy theory. Well, I know perfectly well that there are more than one conspiracy theories, let’s say on QAnon. So I’m not even exactly sure what it’s referring to. Is there a particular conspiracy theory that you were criticized for refusing to condemn? Do you have any more specific details about that? I mean, I’m not sure exactly what they’re talking about. They might be referring to the fact that there’s something called adrenal chrome where they’re taking children’s blood and devouring it and so forth. And I’ve explained my experience with that and I just did in West Africa and other places. We’ve seen this in several parts of the continent of Africa. And it’s very real. It’s very real, this witch’s doctory. They take these children, they take their organs, they take their blood, they drink it. They take the genitalia of children and hang it over the rooftop of their businesses thinking that the dark gods will bless them. These are real things. And so I might say something like that and then they connect it to something that a QAnon person says about a celebrity who must be doing this too, but there’s no evidence to back that. And they make a false connection there. And so that’s the only example I can think of. Okay, got it. Well, the next thing it says is that the Operation Underground Railway falsely claimed that it had entered a partnership with American Airlines. That was in 2022. So what do you have to say about that? Oh, that’s a great one. So a PR firm who represented us made a deal with American Airlines, came to us and said, shoot the video. They’re gonna put this video on your, we’re gonna put this video on the airlines. They shot the video of me. I just get a call from our PR company and they put me in a studio. I give a video that I think I’m talking to the passengers for one month on American Airlines. Apparently the deal fell through and the PR company didn’t tell us that. And our marketing company, our marketing team put out, hey, we’re gonna be on American Airlines. The PR company apologized. We fired them. They said, we can’t believe we didn’t get the message to you. And that was it. And of course there’s people that want so badly for us to be wrong or us to not do what we say we do. So they exploited that. And I think that was a Vice Magazine, very incredibly dishonest journal. I can’t even call them journalists. The Vice Magazine, they’ve done a series of hit pieces on us and I encourage people to read it. Read Vice, read Vice because everything they say is so ridiculous and so dishonest. Right, right. Yes, well, and I do believe if I remember correctly that Vice has also declared bankruptcy in the last few weeks and I can’t imagine an organization more richly deserving. There was a 2021 follow-up article from Vice, but I don’t think we’re going to, I’ll just read part of it because it’s so ridiculous. Conflating consensual sex work with sex trafficking. Yeah, well, that’s exactly the kind of weasely, what would you call it, criticism that I’d expect from people who are trying to justify the sorts of behaviors that you are attempting to expose. Then there’s a 2021 article in Slate criticizing a 2014 raid conducted by Operation Underground Railway in the Dominican Republic, saying that it was likely to have traumatized the trafficked children. Anne Gallagher, an authority on human trafficking, wrote in 2015 that OUR had an alarming lack of understanding about how sophisticated criminal trafficking networks must be approached and dismantled and called the work of OUR arrogant, unethical and illegal. So, Anne, have a way at that. Oh, thank you. I’m grateful for this opportunity. So someone like Anne Gallagher, who lives 3,000 miles away from any operation we’ve ever done, is not qualified to talk about our operations. She can’t give any details, she can’t give any examples. The Slate article is a fun one to address. I’ve addressed it several times. We, early on, we brought a blogger down to watch our operations. We invite people down, like Tony Robbins has been down. We invite politicians, the Attorney General of Utah has come in our operations. If we’re hiding something, that’s the last thing we would, of course, do. So we bring this journalist, this blogger, I won’t call her a journalist, and we thought she was a friend, and she came and watched a legitimate operation happen in Dominican Republic. There were seven traffickers who showed up, seven traffickers arrested. There were 20 plus people rescued. Nine of them were children. You can’t always control who shows up to the sting party. The traffickers bring who they will, but nine children showed up. They were all liberated from the control of their captors. This blogger then wrote two glowing stories about it that she witnessed this. She had very minimal exposure to the operation itself. She witnessed it. Some seven years later, she decides to use it, in my opinion, to somehow increase her social media following as our foundation grew, and she writes a story. It’s enslaved. Now here’s the key thing. Nine children rescued, and nine children had three years of aftercare services in this operation provided by International Justice Mission, one of the top authorities in aftercare and fighting human trafficking. Seven traffickers were not only arrested, but all seven were convicted. So she chose the wrong case to criticize. Now tellingly, if anyone’s going to write a story about that operation, good, bad, or otherwise, and they leave out the part that says seven traffickers were arrested and seven traffickers were convicted, and nine children were liberated and have three years of aftercare to heal them, if you leave that part out, either you are extremely incompetent as a researcher and writer, or you’re a liar. Either way, the story has zero credibility on that fact alone, because she doesn’t even report on those two essential elements. All right, well, we’ve hypothetically dispensed with Vice, which of course is a, yeah, well, it’s pretty funny that that’s what they named their organization as far as I’m concerned, and we’ll leave the slate issue aside. Jim, let me ask you a couple of questions if you don’t mind. Do you want to, first of all, tell people about your involvement with Angel Studios, a little bit about your career and why this particular movie, Sound of Freedom, it’s opening, what, in early July? When does it come out? It comes out July 4th week, so next week. Next week it’s out in theaters nationwide. So let me turn to Jim. Jim, can you hear me? Yes, yes. All right, so yeah, do you want to detail out your association with Angel Studios? Tell everybody first who Angel Studios are, what they’ve done, and I’ve watched a lot of The Chosen, by the way, which I thought was extremely high quality. Tell us about the studio, tell us about your involvement with them, about your career, and then about your attraction to this particular movie. Well, let’s start with the movie first. I have three adopted children from China. I became aware of the dangers that go on with children around the world and through that process. Then I became aware of Tim Ballard, and coincidentally, then my friend, Eduardo Verastegui, brought me this script because many of the actors that they had offered it to didn’t want to get involved in this particular project. I read the script. I loved the movie Taken, and I thought, this is like Taken, but with a much bigger heart. Then Tim Ballard came to the meeting. He had seen two films that I did. One was called The Count of Monte Cristo, and then the other one was The Passion of the Christ, and he felt that I’d be the right guy to play him. Angel Studios, I had no connection to them until a few months ago, when they wanted to do this movie, and they wanted, their idea was to sell two million tickets for these two million trafficked children. So why is it that a number of actors, why in your estimation did a number of actors turn down the opportunity to play the role? And why did you decide to forgo that risk and to climb aboard? I forgoed the risk because when you have three children that you loved, when you’d give your life for, it kind of connects into Tim Ballard, and Tim did this for this little girl and the children that he saves. It’s something, it’s a greater purpose that even your career, like I went through this with Mel Gibson when we did The Passion, that my career was the last thing I thought of. What I thought about was the God I love, and I put this, and how I look at it is, is that this God that I love, that he loves me and he deserved to be loved back. And so I would be nothing without him. He gave me my purpose in this life. So Tim Ballard, I was very fortunate that he had seen those films. And when I looked at, and I think Tim made this comparison, Schindler’s List was a very powerful weapon, but it came 50 years too late. This film is now, this is exposing it now during that time. And I believe that is probably why it’s easier to get enacted to do a movie 50 years later. There’s no controversy, it’s over. But then the individuals, imagine if Rwanda, if that story had been made, that movie had been made during that time, or they could see it. You have to look at these situations and understand that good people sit back and do nothing and allow this evil to occur. There’s got to be people that stand up in the time that it occurs. And that’s what drew me to the whole story in the first place. And how do you feel about the movie? Now you’ve seen the movie in its entirety, it’s about to be released. It’s a fully fledged, high quality production. I was particularly impressed by the cinematography. It’s also extraordinarily well edited, the acting, I don’t want to flatter you, but the acting is extremely high quality. It’s very realistic movie. How do you feel about your involvement now that everything is done? And how do you feel about the, what would you say, the production capacity of Angel Studios, which is a relatively, you know, it’s a relative newcomer on the mass entertainment block. When I was sitting next to Tim Ballard and he leaned over and he started to weep heavily, I knew I did my job. So do you want to run us briefly through, I don’t want to give away the entire plot because that would obviously be pointless, but do you want to just run us briefly through, Jim, the plot of the movie, and then I’ll turn to Tim and fill in some of the background details of his life. So I play Tim Ballard, he’s Homeland Security. He sets up these sting operations to take down these very, very bad men to save trafficked children. And in one particular case, one of the traffickers that he takes down, Ernst Lipichinsky, he rescues this boy and the little boy turns to him and says, will you save my sister? And Tim goes back, gets the direction from above and from his wife and goes back and he sells everything to find this little girl. So what I liked about the script, so I’ve noticed that one of the most effective ways of communicating complex ideas effectively is to particularize the problem. And so what happens in this movie is that the broad problem of slavery and human trafficking and the somewhat narrower problem of sexual trafficking of children is zeroed, is what focused on a particular case. And so that gives the movie a very powerful narrative underpinning, right? Because when a problem is particularized and you can see how it affects actual specific people’s lives, it becomes much more realistic and much more palpable. And I thought the movie did a good job of that. Tim, do you wanna walk everybody listening through, let’s go back into the details of your life. Now you worked for this, you worked, we worked for the special forces per se and who are you working for before you decided to forego your career and to pursue this, the case that we’re describing? So I worked for 12 years as a special agent and undercover operator for the Department of Homeland Security, the investigative division called Homeland Security Investigations. 10 of those years were spent on the border tracking child traffickers, people who would exploit children with child exploitation material. So I really learned a lot. In 2006, the laws changed in the United States. And for the first time, US agents were permitted and encouraged to go overseas and find children who Americans were abusing and we can now hold those Americans accountable as if they had committed that crime on US soil. That’s what really changed my life because I started, I speak Spanish fluently and they sent me overseas south of the border. That’s when my eyes opened up and I started seeing the children that I used to only see mostly on the child exploitation material cases. But it was tormenting me, the US government unwittingly was because if I couldn’t find that connection back to the United States, the American kid or the American pedophile, I had to come home. But the problem is I’ve already been exposed to the children, I’ve already been exposed to the problem and oftentimes have made myself the bait. And in 2012, I had enough on this case. I kind of went more, I went further than otherwise I probably should have. The movie didn’t have time to tell you that there was another case in Haiti at the same time that I was working thinking there was a US nexus. And I was told in both instances to come home and you couldn’t work these cases. And that’s when I had a very consequential conversation with my wife and I said, if I stay here, if I do this operation with or without my badge, it doesn’t matter at this point, I can do the work. We will save kids. But I have to lose my job and we have six children. And this is a moral dilemma like I’ve never faced in my life and I was hoping my wife would have responded with get your ass home. You can’t abandon us. First of all, you’re gonna die without the top cover of the US government if you continue this. And who’s gonna pay the bills and feed the kids? She didn’t say that. She said to me, you have to quit your job. It was that easy for her. It became spiritual for her even. She felt a calling and a responsibility that she might have to reckon with one day when she meets her maker. And I knew that she felt that way when she told me this in the crucial moment of decision, about two days before I ended up turning my badge and gun over and went private. She said to me, I will not let you jeopardize my salvation by not doing this. And when she said those words and I knew she meant those words, that changed everything for me. And we jumped into really just an irrational act of service I might call it because it wasn’t rational in many ways. But ultimately it ended in the operation you see depicted in the film, which shows 54 children. Some young adult women were in that group as well, rescued on that island. But what the movie doesn’t have the time to report is that in actuality was 120. There was two other locations being taken down at the same time. And there’s a documentary that’s gonna follow in the wake of Sound of Freedom called Triple Take. Angel Studios will put it out documenting the entire story. And so in the end it was successful and we were able to build upon that success. And I founded Operation Underground Railroad. I run another foundation that was founded by Glenn Beck called the Nazarene Fund. And we’re doing these kinds of operations all over the world today. So how, let’s go back in time to before you worked as a security agent for the Homelands, or an agent for the Homeland Security Investigations Unit. How did you, how were you trained to do that? Like what was your background before you became employed as an agent? And what was it about you that made you capable of engaging in this sort of operation? So I got a graduate degree in international politics. And I always wanted to be in federal law enforcement. My first job was CIA. I was there doing 9-11, working in the operations center. In the wake of 9-11, I found out that I studied terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. That was actually the degree I got at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. And so it was an easy recruit into the CIA because 9-11 had just happened. When I found out that one of the terrorists, Mohammed Atta had staged his attack from Mexicali, Mexico and crossed the border, and I speak Spanish, I wanted to go fight terrorism on the southern border. So I ended up jumping ship from CIA and I joined the newly created Homeland Security Department and became a special agent. For six months, I was tracking those kinds of movements, not human trafficking or child exploitation, but money, guns, terrorism. Six months into that endeavor, I was called into the office of a supervisor and they asked me if I would please forgo everything that I wanted to do with my career and help them start a child crimes unit. I do not know why they asked me. One thing he did say to me was, you’re a young agent, but you’re a person of faith and we know that about you and that’s a requirement or your soul will be crushed. The Bible is a root of wisdom, inspiration, and spiritual nourishment. The Halo app empowers you to explore the Bible’s profound teachings and to effortlessly incorporate them into your daily life. A great place to start while you deepen your understanding of the Bible is to check out Father Mike Schmitz’s Bible in a year, available on the Halo app exclusively for brief daily readings and reflections. Here you can dive into an extensive library of Bible reading plans accompanied by insightful reflections and audio guided meditations. Whether you’re a seasoned Bible reader or just starting your journey, Halo provides a platform for you to engage with scripture like never before. Studying the Bible’s literary brilliance has influenced countless writers, poets, and artists throughout history. By studying the Bible yourself, you’ll gain a deeper appreciation for the power of storytelling, symbolism, and metaphor, enriching your understanding of literature across different genres. The Halo app also helps you connect with a community of like-minded individuals sharing experiences, insights, and encouragement along the path to spiritual growth. Download the app for free at halo.com slash Jordan. You can set reminders and track your progress along the way. Enrich your education and nurture your mind and soul today. Download the Halo app at halo.com slash Jordan. That’s halo.com slash Jordan for an exclusive free month free trial of all 6,000 plus prayers and meditations. I would like you, if you would, to tell us to the degree that you can what you were typically dealing with when you started working for the child sex crimes unit. Let us know what you saw. Let us know what that did to you. That sort of thing, that changes people’s conceptions of humanity per se, let’s say the nature of the cosmos and what it means to be human, right? I mean, when you’re in contact with people who are capable of that level of darkness, you start to understand something about the nature of the human soul that you can’t understand any other way. And that can be, I mean, that’s the sort of thing that gives people post-traumatic stress disorder when they’re soldiers. And now you said also your supervisor had an inkling that you might be protected against that, at least to some degree, because of your faith. So let’s walk through what you learned and encountered first. What did you see when you were working as part of this child sex crimes unit? What I saw was so shocking, Jordan. I thought child sex crimes would be 15-year-olds, 16-year-olds. My brain couldn’t comprehend something more evil than abusing that age. The very first case I worked in 2002, I believe, I was given a bunch of VHS videos, some hard drives to look at that had been seized and then warrant. The very first image I saw were, there were three little boys that were probably seven, five, and three. And they looked like my children. They had blonde hair, blue eyes, and they were being just raped, raped, these three little boys, by this pedophile. And I was so shocked, I fell to my knees, I dry heaved, thinking I was gonna throw up into the wastebasket. I jumped into my car, I drove to my children’s school, my three oldest kids, I checked them out. I still remember in my mind, I can still see dentist, dentist, dentist appointment I wrote. And I grabbed them, I took them home and just sobbed on the floor. My wife came in and I just, I wouldn’t let the kids go, I was just holding them and shaking. That was my very first experience. You talk about PTSD, I absolutely deal with PTSD to this day. I took too long to actually deal with it. That’s another story. And I thought, I can’t do this, I can’t do this. I started getting help immediately because I didn’t wanna quit. And that’s what this is. That’s what this is. And those kind of videos have increased over the last couple of years by 5,000%. Yeah, well, in Canada, we just had a report from an organization called the Western Standard that 1 million child sexual exploitation photos and videos have been identified in an Alberta child porn investigation. 1 million photos, eight arrests made. Okay, so that’s some indication of the widespread nature of the problem. Now, you said that when you first encountered this material, it made you physically ill and also terrified for the safety of your children, but then also it necessitated you seeking help, I suppose, or aid. I mean, I’ve worked with people who’ve had post-traumatic stress disorder. Generally what happens is that tragedy is not enough to give someone post-traumatic stress disorder, even if it’s rather severe. It has to be a combination of tragedy and malevolence. And the real trauma comes as a consequence of contact with evil, with malevolence. And what people generally have to do in order to recover from that is to develop a rather profound philosophy of evil. And a religious faith in its most fundamental essence is a philosophy of good and evil. It does detail out the heart of darkness among human beings, point out to people, this is particularly, although not uniquely true of the Christian tradition, but particularly true that that capacity for evil lurks in the heart of everyone and that our fundamental moral obligation as we sojourn here on earth is to overcome that proclivity within and also to stand up against it in the external world. And so you said you received some aid after you had been exposed to this first set of videos. What is it about the way you looked at the world that had to change in order for you to adapt to what you were encountering? Well, I had to come to grips with an idea that I had never been confronted with before, that there are people and not a few, but millions of people, only millions of pedophiles could justify a demand of millions of child exploitation material, videos and so forth. The first person you see arrested in the movie is a real person named Ernst Lu Potschensky in Sound of Freedom. He had over 2 million pieces of child rape material in his house. So to be confronted with the reality that there are people on this planet, and like I said, not a few, but millions, who want to indulge in watching five-year-old children be raped and sexually assaulted in ways that, and I’m sorry to be so raw, but I feel comfortable with you, Dr. Peterson, but to watch children’s bodies actually break in the act of sexual assault, acts that your mind couldn’t conjure up if you tried to conjure it up and that it’s real, that is so shocking to the system. It changes your life forever. I tell people, I feel like I’ve had a million holes burned into my brain because I’ve watched thousands of hours of that kind of material, not only watch it, and I love the scene that Jim depicts where he’s, that’s very real. I can’t watch the movie, but the movie’s very good. The movie doesn’t show any of this, by the way. It doesn’t show anything like this. I don’t want people to run away and be scared, but you see the scene where the camera flashes a close-up into Jim’s eyes, and that was me for 10 years, not only watching, but writing, writing it in details for the court to see, for the prosecutors to see, and raising children at the same time that are the very same age, and fortunately or unfortunately for me, I now have nine children. At the time, I left the government at six, and so I can always identify the age of a child with one of my own children, and what my mind was almost automatically doing is I would superimpose my own children’s faces and persons onto these children, and that led to the PTSD, I’ll be honest, and almost a paranoia about what would happen to my children and watching my children, and I’ve come a long ways, and I’m able to deal with it, but I was determined never to quit, and so I just sought more help, and I won’t quit, so. Okay, so Tim, I’m gonna walk you through what I know about how people turn into the sort of pedophile that you find so, you and everyone else, I suppose, or virtually everyone else finds so mysterious. So I’m gonna refer first to the story of Cain and Abel, because it actually puts its finger on the process in a stunning manner. So what happens in that story is that two different pathways to adaptation are detailed out, and they become the cardinal pathways of adaptation that characterize the whole human race, immersed as it is from that point onward in history instead of in the Garden of Eden, and one is the pathway of Cain, and the other is the pathway of Abel. Now, Abel makes high-quality sacrifices. He’s all in, right? He puts himself on the line, and he does the real thing, and as a consequence, God finds… He finds favour with God, and his sacrifices are rewarded. He does well, and everyone loves him, and he thrives. And Cain, his sacrifices are not of the same quality. He tries to cut corners and to pull the wool over his eyes and God’s eyes and everyone else’s eyes, and as a consequence, his sacrifices are rejected. And instead of cluing the hell in and waking up and taking responsibility for his failure, he decides that he’s going to call out God for creating a cosmos that’s cosmically unfair and unjust, and the evidence for that is Cain’s failure and Abel’s success. And so he has a little chat with God, and he basically calls him out and says, you know, I’m breaking myself in half here, and nothing’s going my way, and Abel gets everything he wants, and, you know, how dare you make a cosmos so radically unjust and improper, and why don’t you just straighten yourself out? And God says, if you did well, you would be rewarded for it, and you should look to yourself. And then he says something even worse, and this is very subtle because it’s complicated to understand it unless you look at multiple translations or potentially the original Hebrew, which I can’t read, but I read the multiple translations. God says to Cain, the spirit of sin crouches at your doorstep like a sexually aroused predatory animal, and you have invited it in to have its way with you. And so now, if you study the development of the fantasies of very, very dark people, you see that they brood and fantasize in isolation for years, and the fantasies get darker and darker and darker, so they’re bitter and resentful to begin with, and then they start fantasizing about, well, what they would want. That can take a sexual end, or it can take a very violent end, or it can take both, and what they’re really after is the ultimate revenge, and on the sexual front, they find a kick in extending the, what would you call it, unacceptability of the fantasy, one stage at a time. The famous and extremely attractive sexual serial killer, what was his name? It’s a famous photograph of him like this, very attractive man. Do you remember his name? Ted Bundy. Ted Bundy. Ted Bundy detailed out exactly how his fantasies progressed as he became more and more involved with pornography, and what happens in some sense is that these people who are nursing these terrible fantasies want to stay on the edge of novelty, and so their fantasies get darker and darker and darker as they progress down that road, and so after a thousand such micro-progressions, they end up in exactly the sort of pit that you’re describing, and some of that is pure sexual kick because of the novelty, but it’s got this sadistic and perverse, vengeful twist. You could think about it this way. I think it says in the Gospels that it would be better that a millstone was hung around your neck and that you were cast into the abyss than to do harm to any of God’s children, let’s say, and that’s actually where the perverse delight comes because the most egregious possible sin, let’s say, is the violent sexual abuse of the most innocent possible person, and the perverse novelty kick is highest at exactly that point, and then that just goes from bad to worse, and there’s a thousand or even 10,000 micro-decisions that go along with that. There’s also a great book called Ordinary Men. This is well worth reading, although it’s a bloody catastrophe to read, I’ll tell you. It details out how a group of German policemen who were moved to Poland during World War II were transformed from ordinary middle-class, working-class, or sorry, ordinary working-class men, old enough to not have been raised under the Nazi regime, by the way, and so not propagandized into a kind of mindless obedience, how they went from being perfectly ordinary policemen to the sort of people who could take naked pregnant women out into the middle of the field and shoot them in the back of the head, and it isn’t like they had an easy time with that. Some of them reported the same sort of thing that you reported when you first watched that video. What they were being called upon to do stage by stage made them physically ill, and they had a commander who actually had told them that they could leave the service if they didn’t want to continue with their duties, but they felt duty-bound not to leave their comrades having to mop up the terrible situation, but it does a lovely job of detailing out how your movement from normality to absolute perversity is a consequence of 10,000 micro, what would you say, microviolations of your own conscience, not all of them micro, obviously. So you need to know about the vengefulness, you need to know about the kick of sadism, that’s that novelty kick that produces a dopaminergic kick that heightens sexual satisfaction, and so there’s an element of sadistic misery that can add novelty to sex. That’s particularly attractive to people who are bitter and resentful because they actually can’t find any willing sexual partners, and so they’re angry at the world and shake their fist at God because of it. And so anyways, that’s a bit of the developmental course of such a lovely descent into hell, and the interesting thing about it is that people brood, eh? Like you don’t get to the point where you’re watching pornographic videos of children being raped without hundreds or even thousands of hours of increasingly demented voluntary fantasy, and that’s that allowing the spirit of sin that would otherwise crouch on your doorstep to enter your house and have its way with you, right? It’s like a collaborative venture with Satan himself. That’s the most straightforward way of describing it, and so, well, so that’s, I don’t know what you have to say about that, but I’ll let you have at her. I’ll say this, that everything you’re saying absolutely resonates with my anecdotal experiences dealing with these people. I look into their eyes, and what you’re describing is what I see, though I’ve never been able to articulate it like you just have, and I appreciate being armed with an understanding that it will help me evangelize more clearly to others about the dangers of overstimulation and overuse of pornography and shaking hands with the devil, so thank you for that. That was very insightful. So I spent a bit of time, not a lot, but a bit of time inside a maximum security prison when I was a kid. I worked with a very strange psychologist that was there, and one of the things that really shocked me, and I think this shocked me enough to change my whole life, was I met this one prisoner who was a pretty nondescript-looking character. He took me for a walk out in the yard away from a gym full of weightlifting, ax murderer monsters and rapists, and we went for a walk out in the yard, and the psychologist called us back and told me later in the office that this guy who’s about five, two, pretty non-prepossessing guy had made two policemen kneel in front of him, begged for their lives in reference to their families, and then shot them both in the back of the head and kicked them aside, and the shocking thing to me was, you kind of think that if you met pure evil, it would have a monstrous form, and the thing that shocked me about that was the nondescript nature of this guy, his absolutely banal ordinariness, the fact that you could just walk past him on the street and you’d never know, he wasn’t some monster, the monstrous character of Satan in your imagination is a figure that’s terrifying to behold instead of someone normal, you know what I mean, normal in that cringing sense. These people that you’ve interacted with, what’s your reaction to them when you talk to them, the pedophiles, when you talk to them and when you arrest them? My experience is very similar to what you just described, very nondescript, people of all walks of life. We’ve arrested and I’ve interrogated educators, lawyers, law enforcement, clergymen, and sitting across from them, but with no apparent physicality that would tell you who they are, and I will say this, when they start talking and I look into their eyes, that’s when I can, I sense something that really scares the hell out of me, and the way they talk about children when they get there and it’s something that they’ve been able to normalize and they’re speaking to me about children almost like they’re talking about the weather or talking about buying and selling children or like you talk about buying and selling computer parts or an automobile or something, and that’s where I thought something has taken over you, something non-human has made you less human, and I’ve never been able to figure it out, only that it creeps me out and I usually end up getting them to confess because they have brought themselves to a place where they think they’re okay, they think that it’s somehow normal. I don’t know if that makes sense to you, Dr. Petersen. Well, the degree of rationalization that has to, with each step forward in the progress of the fantasy, there has to be a step forward in the self-deception with regards to self-description, right? So imagine that you’re attempting to cling to a sense of yourself at least as normal, but even maybe as a moral agent, I mean, the more forthright pedophiles claim that they’re only allowing children to express their true sexual desires and that what they’re actually doing is forming the best relationship with the children that they’ve ever had. Now, of course, there’s part of them that knows that that’s an absolutely bloody screaming hellish lie, but you get to that lie, like I said, with a thousand micro lies, right? And you’re modifying your self-conception along the way. I mean, have you had these people justify themselves to you? And if so, by what means do they attempt to do that? So one person that comes to mind, absolutely, the answer is yes. And one person that comes to mind is the person depicted in the film, Oshinsky. This person had written articles, self-published, of course. He had a book that he actually sold on Amazon and his understanding or his justification was that the puritanical society of this country has crushed the true and beautiful and righteous sexual experience, which the most natural would be between a man and a child, a prepubescent child. A prepubescent child is the most beautiful form of humanity and why take that away from a child? Children would be well-conditioned to confront the challenges of life if only they could experience orgasmic pleasure, even in their prepubescence. This is how they talk. Right, right. And this is how they- Well, you saw echoes of that. There was attempts made in the 1970s by French intellectuals, surprise, surprise, to have the age of consent reduce radically. And that was always the rationale. It was an extension of the patriarchal oppression theory in some sense, right? That all sexual expression is essentially pure and good in its most fundamental form and it’s all warped by social pressure. And if we were just allowed to express ourselves in every manner that we saw fit, then everyone would be free and we wouldn’t suffer anymore from the constraints of tyrannical society, right? And it’s just convenient for the bloody pedophiles that that happens to justify them doing whatever the hell they want to children who are obviously too young to consent. Right, so he is a good example. I forgot about that in the book. Jim, let me ask you. So now you didn’t have to go through the same things that Tim did and you obviously weren’t subject to the same kind of exposure, but you had to play this role and you had to act out in your imagination the darkness that characterized the people who played your enemies, let’s say on the screen. What were the consequences for you of having to delve even on the fictional landscape into this entire, what would you say, underworld domain? Well, let’s start with your story. Initially, when you brought up Cain and Abel, in my years of working with agents like Tim, and I actually worked with other agents because Tim was very busy doing missions at the time, and I got to go into a lot of his world. I mean, those are the guys that I play, so I don’t imitate other actors. I go and meet these guys and really learn and study what they do. Cain and Abel, for example, Abel is doing good things for God. How would Cain hurt God? By killing Abel, by wounding him. When I go and play, for example, a serial killer or a man that you mentioned earlier, Ted Bunday, who my friend broke that case and found out who he was, Mike Tando. So you’re the beast that comes in you. He comes in and he deceives you and starts with the ego and the whole thing. And then eventually the turn is is how you’re eventually not fair, a non servium becomes one who, how can I wound God the most? By killing the most innocent child. And it wounds God in the greatest way. When you take these innocent children who’ve done nothing and have no sin and these guys have the attitude which you were mentioning earlier, all the cutting of the corners and whatnot. And ultimately they can kill the most innocent and effectively wounds God’s heart the most. I spent a great deal of time. I did this movie, Deja Vu, and I played a Unabomber. And I was on the phone with a friend of mine who broke the case and Ted Bunday. And I talked to him a lot about serial killers. And then I got to look at the, what the FBI and the ATF gave me through Jerry Bruckhammer and Tony Scott, I got all these videos to look at. And I was looking at Unabombers, guys that blow things up and actual serial killers but it was written more like a Ted Bunday and not a man who was writing destiny and all of these things that he’d exchanged his life to take out whoever they wanna take out. But the voice was very similar. And so I don’t go to Satan to play. In this particular story, I play this guy, this bomber and I don’t go to the devil to play the devil. I think many actors make that mistake. I don’t go to God to tell you who the devil is. That’s what I do. And it also gives me a protection. What’s the difference? What’s the difference, Jim? Because that also bears on how you protect yourself from such things. Are you saying the difference is that I play the truth. So if you go and play, go to the devil to play the devil, and put something up there that deceives the public. He’ll always try to hide in the shadow. He’ll always try it because he doesn’t like the light even though he’s called the light, the illuminator, Lucifer. And he tries to mimic God. He tries to be like God. So there’s always like, if God has love and what we see is love, he creates lust. So he’s trying to be like that. It’s like Cain trying to rip off Abel, cutting the corners. And so committing to- Well, there’s a tendency, even in Milton’s Paradise Lost, there’s been two readings of that forever. And one of them is that Milton’s Satan is an anti-hero of the most profound sort, really the embodiment of evil. And the other reading is that Milton’s Satan is a disguised hero and the eternal, what would you say? The eternal rebel against established order and someone to emulate in consequence. And that Milton somehow knew that and was coding that, not precisely secretly, but subtly. And I think that’s a huge mistake. I mean, I’ve familiarized myself with Paradise Lost. And I think that Milton was an extraordinarily subtle writer in that he got everything as right as anyone ever has. But the reason I’m bringing that up is because, so this is, okay, this is a complicated thing to untangle, but one of the things you see in Hollywood portrayals of villains, you saw this in The Silence of the Lambs, you see it frequently in mafia portrayals, is that the villain is inadvertently or even sometimes purposefully glorified. And it’s partly because he’s a rule breaker and has the attraction that goes along with that. But I also wonder too, if it has something to do with what you were describing, is that the writers and the actors find themselves when they’re trying to portray evil, pulled towards falseness in that representation as part of the proclivity of evil to hide itself. And the danger in that is twofold. And one is the danger of deceiving the public as to the true nature of evil, because there’s nothing heroic about it, quite the contrary. And the second danger I wonder about, there’s all this speculation about Heath Ledger and the consequences for him of having played the Joker in such a dark manner. And I don’t know what to make of that, although I do think there is some danger in having to journey down a path of emulating evil in order to represent it. Now, you said that you turned to God, so to speak, to protect yourself against false representations of evil, but also in some ways to shield yourself. And it sounds to me reminiscent of what Tim’s superiors mentioned to him when they said to him that his faith might protect him from what was- I love his question. Okay, go ahead, man. This is the best interview I’ve ever had in my life. I love your line of questioning and getting to what is real. My job is to give what I know to be absolutely certain and real. I hooked into Tim as a childlike quality to him, and I stay with that innocence. And don’t take that innocence as weakness. And so when I read the scripture, I feel truth, good, evil, and I find the good. And let that just pierce the darkness, and it has to pierce. And I know what that light is. And I know that deception, that when I start hearing about, for example, in your life, there’s two masters here. One is from the evil, wicked side, but he comes in through your ego. And the other one is the light side that tells you what you might not want to hear, but you ought to hear. And it’s not manipulative, it’s truth. So I go to that side. Then I pray, then I go through it. Like the Passion of the Christ, I looked at the Shroud of Turin. And there were two men, Christian Tinsley and Keith Vanderland, who were experts in makeup. And the first, both of these men were agnostic. And they looked at the shroud that Mel Gibson presented to them. And one particular way, the way it is through the negative, however they were able to show it, you can see the track lines of Jesus. You can see the actual bamboo sticks that they used to initially hit him. And then you see the cat of nine tails, the track lines. They look like the Grand Canyon in your skin and shock them. Now these guys look at everything from decapitations, murders and everything. Prior to this, I did a movie a long time ago in New York and I was with homicide. And I got to see the contortion of a face when someone gets murdered. And it’s hard to watch. But when you start going into this, which is children, there is something that I can’t even fathom, even with the protection of Almighty God, because it took me two years to get over this. Two years and a friend of mine, Debbie, came into the room. And at around three o’clock in the middle of the night, I was in a chair and she heard me just weeping. Now I would go into these black holes and I have no idea. I don’t remember it. But this was all of the screaming that I had to hear. I didn’t wanna hear it, but I had to hear it. And then I was able to transform that into the movie that you just saw when I asked Alejandro Monteverdi to move our DP to take it and show him my eyeball. So you would see a 20 foot eye to see what Tim goes through to rip his heart out. Now it’s not like this is what I want to experience any more than I wanna get on a cross and have my heart broken. I went through hypothermia. I had to have open heart surgery. I was electrocuted, struck by lightning. I understand the necessity of what I was gonna have to go through could help bring people back to God to wake them up. And quite frankly, more people now, are more afraid of the devil than they are of God because they want a happy Jesus. And the problem is that eventually Jordan, we all are going to die. Eventually that that is going to happen. But people, the power of the devil deceives to say, no, no, you’re gonna be around for a long, long time. And they never wake up. And eventually there is a judgment and then you have to decide or God decides not how you wanna see yourself anymore, but how God sees you and how God sees you is who you really are. And so that’s how I chose to go at this particular case. I had no choice but to go in and I hear the screams in my heart. I hear the screams because of the agents that I got to work with, got to show me things. And they one particular time he says, are you sure you wanna go further? But I was weeping so hard. I said, this is what Tim goes through. This is what I got. I got to see it in order to go into there to take people to a level of, will you do something? Will you do something? At some point it ends for all of us. And so the pain in my heart is much better than the pain in the future. And if I have to see that to save my children, to motivate me to save my niece, to tell my sister, no, walking home at 13 years old from school is not a good choice. Not a good choice. My sister says to me, no, I want my sister, my daughter, excuse me, to have the same kind of experience I have. And I said, no, not until this changes. You need to understand. So Ann, my sister is a good, great mother, but she wasn’t aware because the media that’s supposed to do a good job to tell the truth, well, they’re going into that direction, which is let’s kind of twist it and change it and not talk about it. Or the three letter agencies, they’re not telling the truth. Go ahead, Jordan. How has this changed you? How is experiencing that material and having to play it out changed you? I’d give my life and a heartbeat changed me. I’m less concerned about myself than I am about hurting. I will tell you this right now. I would absolutely die. If this were to change the world and get rid of trafficking and pornography and all of the eight arms of this octopus that has to be destroyed, the only way you can destroy is take the head out. If that hit, I’d give my life for it and a heartbeat. Tim, let me ask you a question. Jim referred to, this is an awkward question. I don’t know how to progress with it exactly right, but he said that he tried to play you with a certain kind of innocence. And there’s a gospel line and the line is, unless you become as a little child, you will in no way enter the kingdom of heaven. And it’s a very, very subtle line because it doesn’t say unless you stay as a child, right? It says, unless you become as a child. And that’s a very paradoxical injunction. And it means something like this. It means if you rediscover the innocence and humility and capacity for play and wonder and open-ended trust that you had as a child, but you still have all the wisdom that you have as an adult after having seen the world, then you have entered into, you might say, a new domain and a more elevated form of being. And Jim said that he was struck when talking to you about it with regard to this childlike innocence that he saw in you, which is a very peculiar thing to observe in someone who’s had to expose himself to all the terrible things that you’ve encountered. And so I don’t have a more fully developed question than that. I guess I just like your response to that set of observations. I do think, I think I know what Jim’s talking about. When we’re doing operations, as you see depicted in Sound of Freedom, it’s some crazy stuff. We’re going into crazy places. We’re talking to monsters and demons. And if I were to apply all the things I know, the things that take me down, the images of children, I could be jaded and less innocent. I think this might go back to the boss who asked me to start this work back in 2002 by saying that we think you can handle this because of your faith. So I do try to be a childlike when it comes to my relationship with God. And there’s a scripture that I repeat in my head constantly as I am going into these dark places. And that’s where I become like a child through that recitation and my relationship with God, or even more particularly with Jesus, because it’s Jesus who says the line, and you’ve already quoted it, Jordan, better than a millstone be placed around your neck and you toss to the bottom of the sea than that you should hurt one of these little ones. That’s so powerful to me because it’s so, it allows me to reduce everything to just an innocent, I hope, childlike relationship with my savior, with my God, because I know where he stands on this. And I might not know everything, and I don’t know how this is gonna resolve in my head. I don’t know how I’m gonna heal the millions of holes burned into my brain. But I do know that if I subject myself completely to an understanding and a testimony that Jesus believes something, he gets mafioso. This is cement shoes kind of talk. It’s not flipping tables outside the temple. I mean, he’s talking about violence. He’s speaking violence, but it’s righteous. And that’s where he stands on children being abused. And that’s where I find- So there’s another idea, there’s another idea that lurks in the passion account, that’s really quite stunning and horrible. So the passion story is an archetypal tragedy. And the reason for that is that a tragedy is when something terrible happens to someone, but a more profound tragedy is when the worst possible thing happens to the least deserving person. And so that’s the passion story, in some ways in a nutshell, right? You have a man who by universal admission, even on the part of his enemies, is at minimum a very good man who undergoes the worst possible sequence of betrayal and punishment. And so that’s the story of the tragedy of human life, writ large, but there’s more to it than that, because there’s a mythological insistence along with that, that Christ was not only crucified, but that he had to descend into the depths of hell itself and harrow it. And what that means to me, psychologically speaking, let’s say, is that you’re called upon before rebirth, that’s a good way of thinking about it, to not only bear the brunt of the tragedy of existence, but to face malevolence head on, right? To go into the deepest and darkest possible places, and what would you say? And well redeeming them to the degree that that’s possible, simultaneously redeem yourself. And so the notion there is that the brightest possible light is only possible through the descent into the darkest possible realm of blackness. And that actually goes beyond death into malevolence itself. Now, Jim said, because you might say, well, there’s nothing that you should be more afraid of than death, but Jim said, he’s appalled enough about the existence of malevolence that he would be willing to give his life to eradicate it. And so that obviously means that for Jim, malevolence itself is a more terrifying specter than mere death or even mere suffering. And then there is this gospel notion that unless you’re willing to take the weight of hell onto yourself, essentially, voluntarily, that you can’t go through that process of descent and rebirth, and that is associated in the gospel accounts, let’s say, with that rebirth into the spirit of childhood. And so you have done what you could to face malevolence, to face the ultimate reaches of darkness itself. What has that done for you? And then also you made some very interesting comments about your wife. You said that in some ways you were hoping she would tell you to be sensible and come home, but she didn’t. She told you to go put yourself on the line. And there’s a huge story there that’s touched on in the movie, but not delved into any great regard. How has your encounter with the darkness that you’ve seen made you a better person? And what has that done with your relationship with your wife? I think it’s made me a better person because the weight that you speak of that is on your back is unbearable unless you can give it to some other power, in this case, in my case, to Jesus himself. And that’s what, to subject myself completely and repeat his words in my mind, because I know where he stands on it, he’ll take it from me. And I’ve felt that. I have felt that in ways I can’t even articulate that don’t make any sense on a scientific level. The burden is lifted. And that’s what gives me clarity and courage to do things I otherwise wouldn’t dream of doing in order to help children. And it’s a concept that my wife understands. In fact, I’ll tell you this, it’s like she morphed into some kind of a therapist in that moment after she told me that her salvation might be on the line. She’s much more advanced than I am in every way, and especially spiritually. And she helped me to see that very thing that give the burden to God, and then you can be, but you have to subject yourself like a child in order to do that and recognize you can’t on your own do it. But she ran me through this exercise. I don’t know where she got it. Maybe it was a download from heaven, but she said, do you see the two paths you’re going on? Either you go into Columbia and you do this operation, and what does that look like? And I said, it looks horrifying. It’s scary, it’s dark, there’s cobwebs. I mean, I was literally imagining this. There’s spiders, there’s evil things. And she said, what’s the other path? And I said, well, the other path is light. I can see at 50, I get to retire. I’m paid a federal government salary my whole life and benefits and that seems secure to me and that seems comfortable. Then she says, close your eyes and you’re with your maker. You’ve passed through this life and you’re talking to your maker and he has two questions for you. One, could you have saved the kids? And two, did you do it? That’s your interview. It shocked me. I thought, oh, that’s gonna be a bad interview if I don’t have the right answer, if I don’t make the right decision here. And then she says, okay, now go back to those two paths. What do you see? And I’m telling you, the cobwebs and creepy things were now on the path of staying in my federal government comfortable job. I thought, what might I lose? What blessings might not come? And then she said, what do you see down the path of Columbia? And she said, I see warmth. I can’t see everything, but that’s the path I want. And I think that’s what that means is I will give it to God and do the right thing and subject myself like a child. I hope that made sense. Well, look, the reason that people lie and the reason they remain silent is because they think that things will be easier for them and better, at least in the short term. But the psychological literature on this is pretty damn clear, I think clearer than any other element of the clinical psychology literature, which is that you avoid things that stand in your way that frighten you at your great peril. If you power from them in silence, or you turn away seeking security even, or even sensible security, you violate the principle of your own strength. And if you violate the principle of your own strength, you become weak. And if you’re weak, there is no security. Like if you’re weak and you have a pension, you’re weak with a pension. All that’ll mean is that you’ll live longer in terror. That’s not helpful. And the alternative, and that there’s also an ethos in the biblical stories in particular, and it’s a very interesting ethos. It’s very much worth knowing. And one is that if you say the truth and nothing else, you’ll have an immense adventure as a consequence. You won’t know what’s going to happen to you. And you have to let go of your clinging to the outcome. You have to let go. But the truth will reveal the world the way it’s intended to be revealed. And the consequence for you will be that you’ll have the adventure of your life. And the other part of that ethos is this. And it makes perfect sense to me. I can’t see how it can be any other way, which is that whatever makes itself manifest as a consequence of the truth is the best possible reality that could be manifest. Even if you can’t see it. And in my own life, I’ve been attacked many times by people who were attempting to demolish my reputation and take me out, and that’s put my family at risk. And many times, we’ve gone through this a lot. And what we have observed is that if we stick to our guns and we say what we believe to be the case, and I say we because it’s a collaborative enterprise, I’m always discussing things with my family, that there’s a period of intense discomfort but in the aftermath of that, and that’s often several months or sometimes even several years later, things switch around and reverse in a manner that brings benefits that can’t even be fathomed. So, and it is a matter of faith, right? So the faith is something like this. Like, are you gonna make your way through life with silence and falsehoods? Are you gonna make your way through life with truth? And there’s gonna be a price for the truth, but your vision showed you there was a price for the security too, right? Once you allowed your imagination to manifest itself, you saw that the pathway of security was actually the one that was covered with spider webs, demons, and snakes. And I saw that with faculty members at the university over and over. They would take the so-called secure path forward, and all they did was violate the integrity of their own souls, right? All that security is false. And obviously your wife, for some reason, it’s quite the miraculous part of that story, I would say, that your wife was behind you like that, especially because you said you had six kids at the time. So how do you think she knew this? You said her faith is more developed than yours and that she knows things you don’t, but what was it about her life did you think that enabled her to stand behind you and this crazy venture you went on when she had every reason to make… I mean, the movie says you were within what? Months of vesting your pension. How many? 12 weeks, something like that? I can’t remember the exact time, but yeah, that was the… My accountant came to me and showed me how many millions of dollars this would amount to that I was walking away from. It was ridiculous. I want to say $12 million or something, a number I couldn’t even fathom, but you’re walking away from that. And that really tossed me. And that’s the thing that led me to Catherine and said, this is what we’d be walking away from. Why does she have this thing? It’s a mystery to me. I can say this, having given birth and raised six children, I’ve watched that process. There’s something I think that happens to women, at least in the case of my wife, that there’s some insight that comes from that process and childbirth and rearing a child that she’s had to rely on God just to get through that process and then have this little creature that you’re in charge of. I think her relationship with God allowed, through motherhood, allowed her to have insights that I didn’t have. I think she came with certain gifts as well before this life. But whatever it was, she saw immediately and on the spot was able to run me through that exercise that really is consistent with your understanding of that process, Dr. Peterson. So I don’t know, she’s a miracle. She’s a miracle to me. And none of this would have happened without her. Well, okay, so you quit your job and you put your pension on the line and your wife was not only fully on board with that, but perversely enough, encouraged you to do so. How has the financial support that made your continued existence and also the operations that you’ve undertaken, how has that manifested itself since? Like you don’t have your pension and the government behind you, but obviously you’ve gathered resources around you personally and practically. Tell me how that came about. Well, I’ll add this piece, because that was my big concern. And Catherine said to me, and she believed it, this was all in that same conversation. She said, I don’t care if we end up living in a tent. We will not go back to our maker. Instead, we didn’t try to help these children. So that helped ease my mind, because I thought, well, then okay, if we lose our house. Now, the blessings did come. Glenn Beck was the person who actually funded the rescue operation that you see depicted in the film, that very first one. He got us started, put a huge amount of faith and frankly risk in doing that. But that was gonna get us only about six to eight months before we would be in trouble. But what happened was the success happened. The piece that I felt in making the decision to go was that new path that I couldn’t see everything, but it felt right. It felt good. It felt godly. And I knew it’d be okay. And we’ve never had a worse month than the month before. We’ve only grown. With success, bread success, donations start coming in, opportunities come in. And frankly, I think I’ll be better off financially as I look at my future than I would have been otherwise. Right now, we should just dwell on that for a minute. So we just wanna dwell on how unlikely that is, hey. So let’s just go through this. So you make this crazy decision to quit your job and to forego your pension, even though you’ve basically vested it. And you’re well into your career. You’re to the point where in principle, you could have contemplated retiring and sitting to drink Mai Tai’s on the beach in the Caribbean, which I wouldn’t recommend by the way, as a retirement plan. And instead you decide that, and with your wife, that you guys are willing to risk living in a tent with your kids, but you’re gonna do this come hell or high water. And the consequence of that is that, perversely enough, you’re actually more financially secure and you have more opportunities than you would have otherwise had by a lot. Right, so that’s worth thinking about, right? That’s really worth thinking about because you threw yourself all in, which is what you’re supposed to do. And not only did that work on the fight side because you have been able to rescue these children and to continue this endeavor, but none of the things that you thought you would lose, you actually ended up losing. That’s correct. And I’m thinking of the words you just said five minutes ago about when you take on the challenges, you lose that weakness that you otherwise would have. I’d rather, you know, I don’t wanna be weak with a pension. And like you said, I was able to be stronger and that strength is the thing that frankly allowed me to expand my possibility of making more income and doing more things. In fact, I often journal, Jordan, often when I have the biggest challenges of my life that come and I hit in the face with this or that, I take note what blessings came, what good things came. And sometimes it’s 90% of the good things before me sprung out of that horrific challenge that the darts thrown at me, whatever it was. And so the principle that you’re teaching really has played out accurately in my life over and over again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think that’s, well, it makes sense in some sense. Look, I mean, if we wanted to just think about it practically, you’re going to become stronger, more confident, more credible and a better communicator in precise proportion to the burdens that you decide voluntarily to confront and master. Like obviously, because how could it be any other way? And then what that’s gonna mean is that when you go communicate with people and you tell them what you’re doing, they’re much more likely to jump on board because you have the charisma that goes along with having the stories to tell and those encounters to relate and the success you’ve generated. And so then people are going to offer to help. You’re not even gonna have to ask them. And so let me ask you about that. You talked about Glenn Beck. Who else has been instrumental in helping your operation grow and providing you with support? You mentioned Tony Robbins as well. And I’ve got to know Tony a bit over the last year or so. I mean, he’s an absolutely remarkable person. And I think he might be the most charismatic person I’ve ever met, which is really saying something because I’ve met some very charismatic people and he’s quite the monster in the world and he’s done an awful lot of good. And he’s obviously supporting you as well and is on board with this project. And so how did that come about? Well, Tony Robbins is in fact the single largest donor to our operation. I’m super, super close with him. His wife as well, Sage, beautiful people, beautiful souls. It came about in the most amazing way during one of his big mastermind conferences and a convention center of some sort. There was a woman who raised her hand when Tony asked about bucket list projects. If you had an excess of whatever, what would you do with it? She raised her hand and said, I’d support a group called Operation Underground Railroad. Tony says, what is that? Three minutes later, he says, I’ll donate. I’ll match whatever someone gives me right now to help rescue children. And that’s where the relationship was born. He called me a few days later and said, is this real? I said, I felt it was. I said, why don’t you come down to Haiti with me? We’re about to do an operation and you can see how very real it is. And he did and he saw, and that converted him to our cause. So what’s on your plate next? Where is this going as far as you’re concerned and what sort of impact have you had in sheer numbers? Why do you think you’re not gonna get taken out? Because it seems to me that you’re in a situation where that’s of reasonable high probability given who you’re dealing with. And what do you hope to accomplish over the next, what do you hope to accomplish over the next while and what can people do to help? Well, so I’ve changed quite a bit of how I look at the playing field of human trafficking. I can no longer do operations. I’ve been in the media too much, especially with this film. I’ve turned a lot of my attention to the fact that in what I call spiritual warfare, children are targeted like never before. I was on the Capitol Hill last week and this congressman was telling me, how do we wake people up to the fact that all these unaccompanied minors are being shoved into America and we don’t know where they are? And I said, well, your problem is you’re not connecting all the dots, all the ways in which children are being hurt. Not only these 85,000 missing children that are now in the belly of the largest potentially stalled sex market in the world, but at the same time that’s happening, you have groups trying to get rid of the name pedophile and call them minor attracted persons. At the same time, you’re sexualizing children, I used to be able to arrest you for giving children. Now teachers in California and other states are giving this in the name of liberating children sexually or sex education. And now a 13 year old can consent to gender mutilation and have themselves injected with all sorts of chemicals that might ruin their reproductive system. Well, what are you doing? Consent to do that equals consent eventually to sex with a 50 year old pedophile. And so you got to connect all these things. And so for the first time in my life, Jordan, I’m looking at the United States of America and I’m saying, look, I used to think I might be out of a job because we eradicated human trafficking. I am now thinking I might be out of a job because the very laws that protect children and allow us to go after their captors are being and will be decaying and eroded with this crazy culture that is taking children in the name of liberating them and in fact is enslaving them. So, you know, I interviewed this girl, Chloe Cole, who had a double mastectomy when she was 15 and who had puberty blockers and went through the whole bloody gamut of incompetent lying therapists and sadistic butchering surgeons. And they transformed her sexually. And then she talked to me about her dating experiences in high school. Now you can just imagine this, you know, it’s complicated enough for a young man or a young woman in high school to navigate the sexual shoals, let’s say, and establish a reasonable relationship or even a reasonable sequence of relationships if everything is roughly normal or something approximating ideal. But Chloe put herself way out on the fringes having done what she did. And that took her out of the dating pool in high school for her compatriots. And so she turned to online dating and you can imagine the sort of people who attempted to pick her up. And she didn’t refer to that an awful lot in our interview, but she referred to it enough so that I got a real flavor of the sort of people who were more than perversely willing to strike up a relationship with her, often much older, as you pointed out. And so, you know, that freedom that she was hypothetically offered that only required the sacrifice of her breasts, let’s say, the wounds of which, by the way, have never completely healed. So that’s perfectly goddamn delightful. And, you know, she talked about her descent into that perverse underworld of deviant sexual attraction. And so, yeah, there’s not a lot of freedom on that front. Jim, what are you up to next? Like you finished this movie, it’s gonna open up on July 4th. What’s next for you on the project front? And also on the personal front in terms of your commitment to continuing the work that you’re starting with this movie? Well, it goes to the next chapter, which is on Haiti. And that’s the next part of Tim, when they went down and did this Haiti mission. And this is a much better script than the first one, written by the same director. And Rodbar Alejandro Monteverde wrote this. So I plan to do that film. And then, of course, I’m doing the resurrection of the Christ with Mel Gibson. So I think that’s gonna be, I think for sure it’s one film, but it might be two films, I think. And when, so, and what do you see, what do you foresee happening on the theatrical release front? I mean, have the typical companies that are involved in theatrical release in movies been on board with the release of Sound of Freedom? Or have you run into like enthusiastic reception or resistance, what’s happened on that front? Well, we had a lot of resistance. It took us four years to get where we’re at right now. Like The Passion of the Christ, nobody saw that as a financially feasible film. Same thing with this. Who’s gonna wanna watch a film about trafficked children? That’s why it wasn’t about that. It points in that direction, but it’s really in the face of evil, can good still triumph? And that’s what this film is. So it’s quite inspirational. Well, it is a classic, in many ways, it is a classic action adventure film. I mean, it’s based on a true story, but it’s got a very solid narrative driving line. It’s not fundamentally making its appeal on the moral side. There is an appeal on the moral side, don’t get me wrong, but that’s not good enough for a movie. Like a movie has to carry its own weight as an artistic endeavor, and it has to be well plotted and well acted, or just degenerates into kind of moralistic propaganda. I don’t think this movie does that at all. I also didn’t think that The Chosen did that, Angel Studios’ other major production. It never degenerated into sentimental moralizing, thank God. Because something like that will just flop at the box office anyways, and I certainly couldn’t see any reason after having watched this movie not to think that this could be a commercial success. I mean, it’s a very exciting movie. We’re selling out right now. Our biggest war right now is to get more theaters. The big studios control those, and the distributors have to decide whether or not, and this happened on The Passion of the Christ, whether to go and go where the people are. And so the people are calling in right now to ask for these theaters. They’re not just going to agel.com. I’ve known many people that have gone in and literally bought out all theaters to do this. And so we’re hoping that this continues because we won’t be able to serve the public. We just don’t have enough theaters right now. Well, that’s a good problem to have, I would say. And that should also get you the kind of publicity that should also further distribution of the film. And of course, there’s alternative routes now too. I mean, Matt Walsh had tremendous success distributing What is a Woman on Twitter. I think they got 170 million views. And I don’t know how successful that was commercially. And of course, that’s a problem because financial issues matter. But there’s definitely multiple venues now where a film like this can be distributed. Of course, Angel Studios had a hell of a success distributing what they produced on the chosen front using rather unorthodox channels online. And we were fortunate enough, Jordan, to get Elon Musk. He actually tweeted out a couple of weeks ago with the trailer and opened up Twitter as a free home for distribution. And we’re going to see a Twitter release, I think, mid-July. So that will be fun to see what happens there. Oh, so that’s already in play. All right, well, look, gentlemen, we’re running out of time on the YouTube front. As everybody watching and listening, or at least as some people watching and listening know, I do add another half an hour of interview on the Daily Wear Plus side. And so I think we’ll turn our attention to that. I’m going to find out from Tim and Jim what developmental route they took to the destination that they arrived at. I haven’t done that with two people before, but I think that will be quite entertaining. And so I’m interested in how people’s destinies make themselves manifest across time, or you might say how their calling makes itself, makes its appearance in their life, because things do call to people. Everybody has problems that beset them that are their problems, and everybody has opportunities that beckon to them that are their opportunities. And that’s kind of a mysterious, what would you say, bargain and interplay between the psyche and the world. And I’m endlessly curious about how that happens. And so we’re going to follow down that road as we continue this conversation on the Daily Wear Plus side. By the way, for those of you who are watching and listening, if you’re thinking about throwing some support the Daily Wear Plus way, it’s probably a good time to think about doing that because they and I, for that matter, have been under a fair bit of pressure from YouTube in the last month. I’ve had three of my interviews taken down, and I suspect there’s a couple in the pipelines that are also going to raise the hackles of the wrong people, whoever the hell they are, lurking behind the scenes. And so, yeah, yeah, well, you never know, right? You can’t tell what rules you broke, and you can’t tell who’s enforcing the censorship rules, which is really not good on any front. So anyways, we’re going to turn our attention over there. Thank you to Jim Caviezel and Tim Bellard for talking today. I really enjoyed your film. I’m looking forward to watching how the public will receive it and what the consequences will be, and wish you both luck in your future endeavors. And yeah, and Tim, I will hook you, your wife up with my wife, and it’d be real interesting to have them talk about how she saw what you were doing and why she threw her weight behind it, because there’s quite a story there as well, as far as I can tell. I’m very much looking forward to watching that interview. All right, gentlemen, it was good to talk to both of you, and thank you everyone watching and listening. Thanks for your time and attention. Pay some attention to this movie if you’re inclined. You bet, guys, you bet. Good to meet you both. Transform Your Life